The Singularity? Or At Least, Mind and Brain

If another life, I would have gone into neuroscience, I remember I said years ago. (Why don’t you? A friend asked in response. I said, I like what I’m doing now. At the time, I believe, I was doing my degree in interdisciplinary environmental studies.)

I am in the midst of fully reading a special report that I discovered last summer, by IEEE Spectrum on: the singularity. It’s fascinating, but somehow it doesn’t exactly give a definition of what the singularity is, so I’m left wondering whether it is 1) the idea that we are going to be able to upload are consciousnesses into computers, an idea that the scijourno John Horgan who wrote the intro article says too many people wrongly think will come soon; but which, for some reason, Horgan still focuses his article on (who knows, maybe because that is what’s going to pull readers in – for the same reason it has gotten so much attention despite being scientifically unsound. The fact that it will happen soon is what’s scientifically unsound, he says… not necessarily the fact that it can happen at all).

Or the singularity is 2) this notion that I’m really really interested in and am going to write my first story pitch for my Science Reporting class about – related to the relationship between mind and brain, namely, how does the brain give rise to the mind? the nature of consciousness… whether a computer model of the brain can essentially, one day perhaps, be a mind… You can extrapolate that into the world of artificial intelligence and “alive,” or conscious, robots – but that stuff I’m not so much interested in, as much as simply understanding the interconnection between the physical brain and the thinking? conscious? brain. I am only interested in those machine-life-form themes because they can provide a lens through which we can understand our own consciousness – artificial intelligence is, to me, a thought experiment, through which we can visualize consciousness.

So, the whole thing is amazing. But Horgan’s article is also depressing, because its main point, perhaps, is that we understand so little of the brain. And we are far too far away from the point where we might be able to upload our consciousnesses. (Again, I’m confused about why he fixates on this point in the article, since that is not the point that I personally find most interesting; it’s kind of fringe thinking, which doesn’t really have real relevance today, because it isn’t scientifically based. So why keep coming back to it? And center the entire special report on it? Just to give a reference point against which to discuss the actual science?)

It’s disappointing that we understand so little of the brain because that means I can’t come up with a story that says, wow! we’re almost there! It essentially means we are not at a point where we understand how, and why, the brain gives rise to the mind… we are far, far away from understanding consciousness. That’s sad, not just because I can’t come up with easy “breakthrough!” story ideas then, but also because, well, we know so little.

I guess my next task can be to look at what developments have occurred since last summer. Any solid steps would be good for stories, even if they’re not about humans having accomplished the entire, vast, grand feat. Those steps would also be good, not just for scijournos, of course, but for science….for humanity…for the furtherance of knowledge.

Check out this amusing bit: Who’s who?